Thriving Neighborhoods Lab

Before we dive into the world of holistic neighborhood development, meet the father-son team behind the Thriving Neighborhoods Lab podcast. Kirk Wester-Rivera brings 28 years of lived experience transforming a historically disinvested Tulsa neighborhood, from founding a federally-qualified health center to leading the creation of Tulsa's only inclusively grown neighborhood in a decade. Markos Wester-Rivera was born and raised in that same community, witnessing neighborhood transformation firsthand while developing expertise in data science and spatial analysis.

Together, they founded Cerca Solutions to help organizations become powerful forces for community transformation. In this brief introduction, learn how their unique combination of lived experience, systems thinking, and analytical rigor shapes their approach to supporting community quarterbacks across the country.

How did concentrated poverty become engineered into specific neighborhoods across America? In this conversation, Kirk sits down with David Edwards, the Policy Advisor for Neighborhoods at the City of Atlanta and Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Urban Research at the Jimmy and Rosalyn School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology to explore Purpose Built Communities' groundbreaking white paper, "Poverty and Place."

Together, they unpack the sobering science behind intergenerational urban poverty—from the toxic stress that impedes children's brain development to the deliberate public policies that segregated our cities and concentrated disadvantage. Edwards explains how 50 years of anti-poverty programs have relieved symptoms without addressing root causes, and why the solution lies not in fixing people, but in transforming the neighborhoods where they live. This episode lays the essential foundation for understanding why place-based strategies aren't just one approach to community development—they're the approach that science and research increasingly point toward. If you've ever wondered why some neighborhoods thrive while others struggle generation after generation, this conversation reveals the uncomfortable truth: it was by design, which means it can be redesigned.

Link to the White Paper Mentioned in this episode: https://purposebuiltcommunities.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Poverty-and-Place-White-Paper-Digital-Edition.pdf

What happens to a child's developing brain when their neighborhood is starved of investment? In this episode, Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Dr. Doug Jutte to go beyond the social and economic dimensions of place-based poverty and into the biology. Building on Episode 1's introduction of toxic stressors, Doug unpacks the science of how early neighborhood conditions get literally built into children's bodies and brains and what that means for how we invest in communities. If you work in community development, philanthropy, education, or policy, this one is worth your time.

Neighborhoods occupy a unique position in community development, large enough to address systemic challenges, small enough for residents to have real influence over outcomes. In this episode, Kirk and Markos explore why the neighborhood scale is particularly well-suited for creating lasting change, and what that means for how organizations approach their work. It's a foundational conversation for anyone working to understand where and how transformation actually takes hold.

Kirk and Markos discuss one of the core tensions in community development: how to build on what a community already has while being honest about what it still needs. They explore why leading with community strengths matters, why external resources are still necessary in historically disinvested neighborhoods, and how to bring those resources in without creating dependency.

Logan Herring built REACH Riverside after seeing something that practitioners across the country quietly recognize but rarely name: a neighborhood full of good organizations doing good work can still fail to produce transformation if no one is holding the integrated strategy. In this conversation, Kirk Wester-Rivera and Logan work through what that gap actually looks like on the ground, what the quarterback role does that nothing else in the ecosystem can do, what structurally breaks down when there isn't one, and what it really costs an organization to take it on.

They close with the argument practitioners can bring to funders and boards who don't yet see why a lead entity isn't optional.

Good work done in silos rarely adds up to transformation. Housing organizations build housing. Education groups improve schools. Workforce programs create job pathways. And yet neighborhoods stay stuck. This episode gets into why.

Kirk and Markos Wester-Rivera trace the progression from outputs to outcomes to actual transformation, and make the case that reducing toxic stressors for kids and families requires addressing interconnected causes at the same time. Single-issue interventions, no matter how effective, can't get there on their own. The episode also tackles the harder structural question: what has to shift in how we fund, measure, and organize this work to make holistic approaches possible in the first place?

Investment without protection displaces the people it was supposed to help. Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Tony Pickett, CEO of Grounded Solutions Network, to work through the central tension that lives underneath all neighborhood revitalization work. Through 35 years of building community land trusts and shared equity housing models, Tony has spent his career making the case that affordability can't be periodic, it has to be permanent. The conversation covers what displacement looks like as a threat rather than a side effect, how protection strategies get operationalized alongside investment, and what forces work against the protection side once a neighborhood starts attracting attention.

Carol Naughton has spent more than thirty years inside some of the most consequential neighborhood transformation efforts in the country, from leading the East Lake Foundation to helping launch Purpose Built Communities in 2009, where she has served as CEO since 2020. In 2025, Forbes recognized her on its 50 Over 50 Impact list.

In this episode, Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Carol for a practitioner-to-practitioner conversation about what a multi-decade commitment to neighborhood transformation actually looks like on the ground, for organizations, for communities, and for the funders who support them. They dig into what the sector gets wrong about time, what it costs the people being served, and what practitioners who want to play the long game need to understand that rarely gets said out loud.

Markos and Kirk discuss the difference between asking communities for input and giving them genuine decision-making power. They dig into why the first approach is so common, what it costs organizations and funders to share real authority, and what community ownership looks like in practice.

This episode closes out the series with a conversation between Kirk and Markos about proximity, trust, and what it means to do this work alongside community rather than from a distance. Markos shares his own experience growing up in Kendall-Whittier, and how that shaped his understanding of what trust requires. Kirk reflects on the choice to live among the community his family served, and the two discuss what proximity looks like for practitioners who won't live in the neighborhoods they work in.

Series 2 of the Thriving Neighborhoods Lab Podcast opens with host Kirk Wester-Rivera in conversation with Othello Meadows of Blue Meridian Partners. This series examines whether the organizations doing the work are built to deliver what they promise. The episode looks at what community quarterbacks are trying to accomplish, what each vantage point in the field, from operating on the ground to governing a national network to deploying capital, allows a person to see, and what working at neighborhood scale with a smaller portfolio makes possible to know about the families being served. It also raises the growing question from funders of how we know, and what it would take for the field to answer it with evidence.

Community quarterback organizations are frequently answerable for results produced by partners they cannot direct, replace, or pay. In this episode, Kirk talks with Marvin Nesbitt, president of Focused Community Strategies in Atlanta, about the difference between getting partners to a table and getting them to move together. They discuss how to tell when a full table is not producing what a community needs, what it means to own a result when schools and partners hold most of the levers, and why the collective impact and continuous improvement systems behind that ownership are still under construction.

The conversation also covers what it sounds like to ask a partner to do something differently, how the pace of trust compares with funding cycles and development timelines, and what a leader should examine before concluding a partnership is going well.